Subtitled "One family's story of America's Japanese internment", and published in 2012, this book by Kimi Cunningham Grant chronicles the story of "Obaachan", her grandmother (whose condition for recounting her experiences was that no names should be mentioned). It makes for a good audiobook (my version was really well read by Emily Woo Zeller).

The story works on several levels. At its heart is an account of her family's experience of imprisonment, when -- along with tens of thousands of other Japanese resident along the west coast of the United States -- they were sent first to relocation camps, and then to internment sites (which the author has no qualms about calling concentration camps).

The camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, where Obaachan gets married, bears her first child, and loses her mother, has been opened as a museum, and has a useful online rundown of the history of anti-Japanese sentiment in the US, which long pre-dated the Second World War and the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour. The California Alien Land Law, for example, barred Issei (first-generation migrants) from owning land. The Immigration Act of 1924 significantly curtailed immigration from Japan. Despite all the restrictions, the Issei founded families, and set themselves up as merchants, tradesmen, and farmers. Their children -- the Nisei, or second generation -- were American-born, spoke English, and had assimilated into US lifestyle and culture. But when Pearl Harbour resulted in Executive Order 9066, "authorizing the military to set up military zones which led to the forced removal of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry", Issei and Nisei alike were caught up in the net. They were told to report to specified assembly centres with their belongings. What they couldn't carry they had to sell, rent out, or abandon.

Some of the heartbreak of experiencing the loss of homes and businesses -- built up by decades of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice -- is recounted in Silver Like Dust. For young people, including Obaachan, the loss included forfeiting the opportunity to study. Especially trying for all were the cramped spaces, the loss of privacy and autonomy, and the complete inability to predict how long this would all last.


Ibusuki, Kyushu, 2022

Prisoners at Heart Mountain, the first trainload of whom arrived on 12 August 1942, "lived in a fenced area of camp that covered 740 acres. It was ringed with barbed wire and guarded by nine guard towers... On January 1, 1943 -- at the camp’s peak -- 10,767 people were confined there. During the 1,187 days the camp was open, more than 14,000 prisoners passed through."

In a supreme irony, "when the government stripped Japanese Americans of all of the benefits of their citizenship, it also asked them to shoulder citizenship’s greatest burden: military service. Many Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain answered that call, leaving their families behind barbed wire to go off and fight for the country that had imprisoned them."

As I listened, I was torn between two feelings. On the one hand, you can't help but think: "Wow, the Jews in Europe were so much worse off." On the other hand, you also think: "But this is AMERICA, for heaven's sake... How could this ever happen?" It is simply astounding to recall that two thirds of those incarcerated as a result of Executive Order 9066 were American-born citizens... Even more outrageous is that the US forced this policy onto its Latin American neighbours: "By the time the program ended in 1944, a total of 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans, including citizens and permanent residents of 12 Latin American countries, had been incarcerated in the United States. Nearly 900 of them were exchanged for American civilians in Japan. One thousand were deported to devastated postwar Japan, a country that many had never been to, at the end of the war. Peru and other Latin American countries refused to let most Japanese return to their former homes."



But there's another level to the story, too. Grant is half-Japanese, but grew up in a largely white town in Pennsylvania without much sense of the Japanese side of her identity. In Silver Like Dust, she not only recounts Obaachan's internment experiences (digging up, on the way, a few family secrets, such as her grandfather's rather difficult personality), but also her evolving relationship with her grandmother. This woman has lived alone since the death of her husband, and has had to face a lengthy course of treatment for cancer. She's proudly independent, and to some extent relishes her new-found freedom (this is the first time in her life that she has not had to be accountable to anyone). She it is who introduces Grant to cultural concepts such as "shikataganai", the idea that there are things that cannot be changed, and therefore it is pointless to try to change them (something of this philosophy was also articulated by Singleman in I Am a Cat).

"Haji", or shame, is another concept that Grant has to try to understand, as it explains why her grandmother was so unwilling to open up about her experiences as a detainee. Another former inmate explains: "We talked about [the internment camps] among ourselves, but with our white friends, we never talked about it. It was embarrassing and shameful to say, 'Well, I was in jail for three years.' So, we kept as quiet as our parents did. And [years later], we never talked to our children about it." It is the Sansei, the third generation, that started to want some acknowledgement of the injustice done.

As this reviewer puts it: "The silence of the interned generations has a ripple effect to the children of those internees and then to the grandchildren... Grant's distance -- in time, in generation, in racial identity -- seems necessary for uncovering those stories. And even then, as Grant chronicles in the book, her grandmother remains reticent about much of her experience... At times, I felt like I was reading a mystery of sorts. The pacing of the chapters lends itself to that feeling of suspense and revelation, of questions that resonate for pages until the grandmother finally reveals some previously hidden information."

I started out a little impatient with the style of narration, which came across as slightly folksy, but I grew to appreciate it as the book progressed. There's a scene, for example, where Grant is helping her grandmother pick grapefruit, and I felt this kind of detail was just a make-weight. But then, at the end, we learn that Obaachan is going to have to leave her home, and the grapefruit trees will probably be cut down. Which makes them a kind of symbol for the loss and unpredictability that have dogged her life.



There's a terrible contemporary relevance about the book as well. Writing in 2021, Stephanie Hinnershitz argues: "Attacks against Asian Americans are on the rise again, but there is a hesitancy among some to see these incidents as a pattern... Recognizing it for what it is -- a pattern of racist violence rather than a smattering of isolated tragedies -- begins with understanding how verbal abuse on streets and racist and xenophobic memes and faulty information create the conditions for physical abuse and attacks."

I've not found anyone who has commented on the title, which seems to come from Chapter 27 of the Book of Job:

Here is the fate God allots to the wicked, the heritage a ruthless man receives from the Almighty:
However many his children, their fate is the sword; his offspring will never have enough to eat.
The plague will bury those who survive him, and their widows will not weep for them.
Though he heaps up silver like dust and clothes like piles of clay,
what he lays up the righteous will wear, and the innocent will divide his silver.

This apparently speaks of a kind of reckoning. Ultimately, it is the righteous and the innocent who will come off best.

May it be...